What are some advantages and challenges you've experienced while working remotely?

I worked remotely for the first 2 years of the pandemic. It was fine at first but when I switched teams and no longer knew everybody from before the pandemic, the social loss started to wear on me. It's not like we had social meetings on my old team, but I think I was able to pretend better or something when I knew everyone in real life.

I also started to struggle to stop working and I hated that and hated the space occupied by my workstation.

I also have a lot of equipment (console dev kits in games industry) and it takes up a lot of precious space.

For all those reasons I'm back in the office 100%. Also I prefer to collaborate in person in my job (it's much easier to hash things out with an artist in person).

Still, there are some things that are permanently changed in ways that make me sad. There will always be some remote folks, so every meeting must be remote accessible (and rightly so), which means we still have to sit on zoom calls a lot of the time. Also zoom has lowered the friction to having a meeting, so we end up having way more meetings.

I don't begrudge the WFHers. I want everyone to have what they want and be happy, and particularly for the parents out there, the saved commute time and flexible hours are a godsend.